“Go hide,” she’d tell him. “Get on out of here, Stan. If you start walking around town looking like that, it’s your own fault if you get raped.”
Surprisingly, the ladies of Fort Niles didn’t mind letting Mrs. Pommeroy groom their husbands. Perhaps it was because the results were so nice. Perhaps it was because they wanted to help a widow, and this was the easy way to do it. Perhaps the women felt guilty around Mrs. Pommeroy for even having husbands, for having men who had thus far managed to avoid getting drunk and falling overboard. Or perhaps the women had come to loathe their husbands so much over the years that the thought of personally dragging their own fingers through the dirty hair of those stinking, greasy, shiftless fishermen was sickening. They’d just as soon let Mrs. Pommeroy do it, since she seemed to like it so much, and since it put their men in a good goddamn mood, for once.
So it was that when Ruth returned from visiting her mother in Concord, she went right to Mrs. Pommeroy’s house, and found her cutting the hair of the entire Russ Cobb family. Mrs. Pommeroy had all the Cobbs there: Mr. Russ Cobb, his wife, Ivy, and their youngest daughter, Florida, who was forty years old and still living with her parents.
They were a miserable family. Russ Cobb was almost eighty, but he still went out fishing every day. He’d always said he would fish as long as he could throw his leg over the boat. The previous winter, he’d lost half his right leg at the knee, amputated because of his diabetes, or “sugars,” as he called it, but he still went fishing every day, throwing what remained of that leg over the boat. His wife, Ivy, was a disappointed-looking woman who painted holly sprigs, candles, and Santa Claus faces on sand dollars and tried to sell them to her neighbors as Christmas ornaments. The Cobbs’ daughter, Florida, never said a word. She was devastatingly silent.
Mrs. Pommeroy had already set Ivy Cobb’s frothy white hair in curlers and was tending to Russ Cobb’s sideburns when Ruth came in.
“So thick!” Mrs. Pommeroy was telling Mr. Cobb. “Your hair is so thick, you look like Rock Hudson!”
“Cary Grant!” he bellowed.
“Cary Grant!” Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. “OK! You look like Cary Grant!”
Mrs. Cobb rolled her eyes. Ruth walked across the kitchen and kissed Mrs. Pommeroy on the cheek. Mrs. Pommeroy took her hand, held it for a long moment. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”
“Thank you.” Ruth felt she was home.
“Did you have a good time?”
“I had the worst week of my life.” Ruth meant to say this in a sarcastic, joking manner, but it accidentally came out of her mouth as the unadorned truth.
“There’s pie.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Did you see your father?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll be done here in a bit,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You take a seat, sweetheart.”
So Ruth took herself a seat, next to silent Florida Cobb, on a chair that had been painted that dreadful trap-buoy green. The kitchen table and the corner cupboard had also been painted that frightening green, so the whole kitchen matched terribly. Ruth watched Mrs. Pommeroy perform her usual magic on ugly Mr. Cobb. Her hands were constantly at work in his hair. Even when she wasn’t cutting, she was stroking his head, fingering his hair, patting him, tugging at his ears. He leaned his head back into her hands like a cat rubbing against a favorite person’s leg.
“Look how nice,” she murmured, like an encouraging lover. “Look how nice you look.”
She trimmed his sideburns and shaved his neck in arcs through foamy suds and wiped him down with a towel. She pressed her body against his back. She was as affectionate with Mr. Cobb as if he were the last person she would ever touch, as if his ugly skull was to be her final human contact on this earth. Mrs. Cobb, in her steel gray curlers, sat watching, her gray hands in her lap, her steel eyes on her husband’s ruined face.
“How are things, Mrs. Cobb?” Ruth asked.
“We got goddamn raccoons all over our goddamn yard,” Mrs. Cobb said, demonstrating her remarkable trick of talking without moving her lips. When Ruth was a child, she used to lure Mrs. Cobb into conversation only to watch this trick. In truth, at the age of eighteen Ruth was luring her into conversation for the same reason.
“Sorry to hear that. Did you ever have trouble with raccoons before?”
“Never had them at all.”
Ruth stared at the woman’s mouth. It honestly didn’t budge. Incredible. “Is that right?” she asked.
“I’d like to shoot one.”
“Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Russ Cobb said. “Had them on Courne Haven, but not here.”
“Really? What happened? How did they get here?” Ruth asked, knowing exactly what he was about to say.
“They brought ’em over here.”
“Who did?”
“Courne Haven people! Threw some pregnant raccoons in a sack. Rowed ’em over. Middle of the night. Dumped ’em on our beach. Your great-uncle David Thomas saw it. Walking home from his girl’s house. Seen strangers on the beach. Seen ’em letting something out of a bag. Seen ’em row away. Few weeks later, raccoons everywhere. All over the goddamn place. Eating people’s chickens. Garbage. Everything.”
Of course, the story Ruth had heard from family members was that it was Johnny Pommeroy who had seen the strangers on the beach, right before he went off to get killed in Korea in 1954, but she let it slide.
“I had a pet baby raccoon when I was a little girl,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, smiling at the memory. “That raccoon bit my arm, come to think of it, and my father killed him. I think it was a him. I always called it a him, anyway.”
“When was that, Mrs. Pommeroy?” Ruth asked. “How long ago?”
Mrs. Pommeroy frowned and rubbed her thumbs deep into Mr. Cobb’s neck. He groaned, so happy. She said innocently, “Oh, I guess that was the early 1940s, Ruth. Goodness, I’m so old. The 1940s! Such a long time ago.”
“Wasn’t a raccoon, then,” Mr. Cobb said. “Couldn’t have been.”
“Oh, it was a little raccoon, all right. He had a striped tail and the cutest little mask. I called him Masky!”
“Wasn’t a raccoon. Couldn’t have been. Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Mr. Cobb said. “Courne Haven folks brought ’em over in 1958.”
“Well, this was a baby raccoon,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, by way of explanation.
“Probably a skunk.”
“I’d like to shoot a raccoon!” Mrs. Cobb said with such force that her mouth actually moved, and her silent daughter, Florida, actually started.
“My father sure shot Masky,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.
She toweled off Mr. Cobb’s hair and brushed the back of his neck with a tiny pastry brush. She patted talcum powder under his frayed shirt collar and rubbed oily tonic into his wiry hair, shaping it into an excessively curved pompadour.
“Look at you!” she said, and gave him an antique silver hand mirror. “You look like a country music star. What do you think, Ivy? Isn’t he a handsome devil?”
“Silly,” said Ivy Cobb, but her husband beamed, his cheeks shiny as his pompadour. Mrs. Pommeroy took the sheet off him, gathering it up carefully so as not to spill his hair all over her glaring green kitchen, and Mr. Cobb stood up, still admiring himself in the antique mirror. He turned his head slowly from side to side and smiled at himself, grinning like a handsome devil.
“What do you think of your father, Florida?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “Doesn’t he look fine?”